We are traveling to Mt. Rainier in Sept. and have a few questions....

Would 2 full days give us a pretty good idea of what the park is?(We are trying to budget time)
Is it better to stay in the park and which hotel do you recommend?
How long is the drive from the park to Portland?

Thanks!

> How long is the drive from the park to Portland?

According to Mapquest.com, the drive from Paradise WA to Portland OR would be 155 miles and take a little over three hours.

Unless you want to do major amounts of hiking, two days will be fine.

Personal opinion is that 2 fulls days would give you a good taste of what the Park has to offer. Never stayed (except camping) in the Park so can't help with hotel. From Paradise it should be about a 3 hour drive to Portland.

We stayed 2 nights, about 1 1/2 days, and it was a good taste of the park. It rained on our full day, so we didn't do as much hiking as we would have liked. We were glad we were there for 2 nights, because the 2nd morning the sky cleared, and the invisible mountain suddenly became visible.

I loved staying at Paradise lodge. The rooms were very small, and very plain, but I liked being up there on the mountain and I liked the atmosphere in the common areas. We went to a ranger talk in the great room one evening, and she talked about several attempts to climb the mountain and the finally making it. It was great.

I think 2 days is fine. You should have time to explore the Paradise AND Sunrise areas, and points inbetween. Staying at Paradise Lodge would be ideal.

I should have said Paradise Inn. I just was looking at the online Seattle Times and they have a nice article on the Inn today:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...aradise05.html

Have you visited the NPS website for Mt. Ranier yet? It has the answers to most of your questions.

http://www.nps.gov/mora/

If you can't get into Paradise Inn, stay at Longmire, which is also a National Park Lodge located within the park. The park is very large and it is nice to be inside, plus, as china_cat says, there are ranger talks and walks in or near both lodges (if still going on in September - they may be a summer thing...).